VA faulted in diagnosing suicide candidates

VA faulted in diagnosing suicide candidates
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Former soldiers are killing themselves at three to seven times the rate of the general population and the Department of Veterans Affairs is failing to diagnose or treat them effectively, a suicide expert testified Tuesday in a lawsuit challenging the VA's mental health system.

Department personnel aren't asking enough questions to determine whether veterans are suicidal, aren't sharing information about suicide risks with the VA's network of hospitals and clinics and aren't implementing their own plans to improve the system, Ronald Maris, a University of South Carolina sociology professor, told U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti in San Francisco.

A majority of the VA's counselors, doctors, social workers and psychologists "don't have the tools and the information that they need to intervene effectively with suicidal vets," said Maris, a former president of the American Association of Suicidology who has been a consultant to the Army on suicide prevention.

He was particularly critical of the VA's top health care administrator, William Feeley, who said in a pretrial deposition April 9 that the agency has no systematic national plan for suicide prevention. Feeley also said he was unaware of any methods of tracking veterans at risk of suicide and that suicide rates "are not a metric we are measuring."

"I would say he was singularly uninformed about suicide," Maris said.
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